Schrodinger's Cat

This iconic thought experiment challenges our understanding of reality

Schrodingers Cat is a thought experiment created by Erwin Schrodinger in 1935.

Imagine that you’ve got a cat in a completely closed box with a bunch of poison inside of it.

But, imagine that the poison is to be released inside of that box at a totally random time.

So in theory, since the box is completely closed, at any given moment, you wouldn’t know if the poison had been released or not, so at any given moment, you wouldn’t know if the cat was alive or dead.

Well, what if I told you that according to early theories of quantum mechanics, until Schrodinger actually opens the box, his cat would be both alive and dead at the same time?

The idea being that until Schrodinger observes the cats condition, the cat exists in a state known as superpositon, where it is both alive and dead and the same time.

This is why quantum mechanics is so trippy! Because not only does it cause us to question familiar notions like cause and effect, it also causes us to think deeply about the potential impact of observing our own universe.

Nowadays, quantum physicists are no longer wondering whether Schrodinger’s cat is alive or dead. Now, they are asking themselves another question in relation to this iconic conundrum.

What if… there are multiple realities?

What if for every choice you make, there’s a new reality spawned in which you made the other choice?

What if there are “many worlds”?

This is the Many Worlds Interpretation theory and quantum physicists today actually wonder if this could be how our universe really works.

If there are many worlds, then at any given moment Schrodingers cat would be definitively dead in one reality while being definitely alive in another.

And it wouldn’t be until Schrodinger opened the box that he found out, which reality he was in.

-Felecia For The Win

Felecia is a software engineer by trade but a philosopher at heart who has amassed a following of over 500K on TikTok by talking about society. Felecia chats about social constructs, social experiments, social programming, and social psychology.